On the Lookout

We don't use our little backyard much. For one thing, it is hot as blazes during the day when the sun beats down relentlessly. For another, there is a busy road just beyond, so it isn't terribly pleasant at the best of times.

But I did sit out there for awhile last evening.

I was skywatching . . .

. . . because we had been alerted to a tornado watch. So, I sat with my after-dinner tea, looking westward, which is where disturbances would track.

As you saw, above, the sky did not look at all ominous. When I peeked around the corner, looking more north than west, there was a large vertical cloud, but it still didn't look dark and threatening.

After awhile, I tracked the storms via online radar, and I saw that the line of storms were passing about 10 miles to the north. (We are the blue dot on the screenshot.)

Sue had gathered crucial items by the basement door, but all was calm here in Carleton Place.

I see that a tornado did touch down a day earlier near Petrolia: a town far away in southwestern Ontario, near Lake Huron and Michigan. I taught there for a dozen years, and one of the students had a very close call with a tornado. Her older brother pulled her into the basement just before the tornado hit. A short while later they emerged to find that their house had been obliterated.

I knew the house and had taught her older sister, Lynn, but I didn't know how close of a call Tracey had until she wrote about it in an English assignment, several years later.

You can see Petrolia on the map, outlined in red toward the bottom right. The body of water to the top left is the mouth of Lake Huron, and the urban area just below it is Sarnia, where we lived for more than 3 decades. Port Huron is the Michigan town on the other side of the river, 

According to this article, there were no injuries, but there was some damage.